I was 17 when I convinced my dad that we should get a pool table and being the supportive guy that he is we began looking almost immediately. After seeing a lot of the used tables around(most of them were not in great shape..) we decided it would be better to get a new one from a local place in town called Lighthouse pools(now inside-out) .
It wasn’t long before I was hooked and playing all of the time. Like most young pool players I became addicted to the movies: The Color of Money and The Hustler.
straight pool anyone
I owe a lot of my enthusiasm for pool to my dad (who is always willing to play even though for the most part he could care less about pool (although I have seen him chuck a few sticks in his day) and My Uncle’s Mike and Neal. As a 17-year-old I would play from 8 on Friday night til the sun came up on Saturday.
practice room
Uncle Neal and Mike are good bar players and always pushed me to get better and to close out tables. It wasn’t long before Uncle Neal nick named me Fast Eddie (it has not stuck) and we were in to some serious grudge matches up in the barn. This was the spark I needed and it wasn’t long before I started the First ever Pool Club at my high school. A group of initially 8 of us would meet and play a tournament each week at a different persons house. By the end of Sr. year we had close to 30 or so people showing up on a regular basis and official club sweatshirts. (I still have the sweatshirt)
I won a lot of those early pool club tournaments and confirmed that for me, pool was here to stay. I always assumed some day I would be great at it; the problem is as Tony Robbins says: Some day never comes. A little over a year ago I decided it was time to get better. I felt like I had plateaued so I signed up for Cue U with Bob and Linda Radford in Illinois.
For whatever reason the thought had never occurred to me to get formal training or pointers on the fundamentals of pool until then. I had just been reading a lot of books and listening to a lot of bad advice. It was in Illinois that I finally learned that my fundamentals actually sucked and that shooting with a crooked wrist probably wasnt the best idea…
The most important piece of advice that I learned though was to approach pool like any sport and to track and monitor: drills, results, and progress. I went to work and decided it was time to finally join an official league as well. I have been very fortunate and we happen to have a great APA masters league here in Toledo that I have since joined. I owe a lot my inspiration for this blog to Tony Robbins and the idea that to take the massive determined action you need to get leverage on yourself. Tony’s definition of leverage is anything that makes it too painful for us not act on what we know we want and should be doing! I am guessing this qualifies…
I have a degree from 
where I majored in Business and graduated with honors and I work for a local investment firm here in town. I am going to apply that line of thinking and discipline to pool(what I learned in college, minus beer pong) . My goal/must is to go from a B-/B player to U.S. amateur Champion in the next 3 years.
(not me)
So can I go from Roy Munson to Fast Eddie? And does Tony Robbins really know what the heck he is talking about? Who knows? I am just hoping not to get Munsoned in Columbus.
